Wikipedia: Although once a thriving center for manufacturing and industry, Camden is perhaps best known for its struggles with urban decay and political corruption. Three Camden mayors have been jailed for corruption, the most recent being Milton Milan in 2000. From 2005 to 2012, the school system and police department were operated by the state of New Jersey.

On October 29, 2012, the FBI announced Camden is now ranked first in violent crime per capita of cities with over 50,000 residents. In 2008, Camden had the highest crime rate in the U.S. with 2,333 violent crimes per 100,000 people while the national average was 455 per 100,000. Two out of every five residents are below the national poverty line.

According to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, Judas was actually a more exalted hero than Jesus. He unselfishly volunteered to perform the all-important villain’s role in the resurrection saga, knowing he’d be reviled forever. It was a dirty job that only a supremely egoless saint could have done. Jesus suffered, true, but enjoyed glory and adoration as a result.

Let’s apply this way of thinking to the task of understanding the role that seemingly bad people play in pronoia.

Interesting narratives play an essential role in the universal conspiracy to give us exactly what we need. All of us crave drama. We love to be beguiled by twists of fate that unfold the stories of our lives in unpredictable ways. Just as Judas played a key role in advancing the tale of Christ’s quest, villains and con men and clowns may be crucial to the entertainment value of our personal journeys.

Try this: Imagine the people you fear and dislike as pivotal characters in a fascinating and ultimately redemptive plot that will take years or even lifetimes for the Divine Wow to elaborate.

There is another reason to love our enemies: They force us to become smarter. The riddles they thrust in front of us sharpen our wits and sculpt our souls.

Try this: Act as if your adversaries are great teachers. Thank them for how crucial they’ve been in your education.

Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast.

Imagine that the evolution of your life or our culture is like a pregnancy: It needs to reach its full term. Just as a child isn’t ready to be born after five months of gestation, the New Earth we’re creating has to ripen in its own time. The recalcitrant reactionaries who resist the inevitable birth are simply making sure that the far-seeing revolutionaries don’t conjure the future too suddenly. They serve the greater good.

Nay even in the life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation—hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually experiences a like change.

Yancey Strickler, 2009:
Photography projects have been very successful on Kickstarter thus far — from Laura Kicey’s trip to Iceland to a Colorado ghost town to a cross-country road trip we’ve seen backers respond strongly. Their success supports a point we tout as being so important on Kickstarter: interesting rewards with a built-in story element. With a photography project, these rewards are just layers of stories: the story of the project, the story of the photographer capturing the image, and the story of the image itself. Many possibilities.

It should be little surprise, then, that the highest-grossing Kickstarter project so far is a photography project. Masters, by George Del Barrio and the Vanderbilt Republic Foundation, has raised $38,000 of its $50,000 goal to date, with five days to go. If funding is successful, the creators will use the money to fly a team to Cambodia and take portraits of the Cambodian “Masters” — the elderly Cambodian musicians whose knowledge, traditions, and history is dying off with them.

“Masters” seeks to preserve that history by preserving and documenting a generation’s legacy. We sent George some questions about his project, and our exchange is below. To support this project, follow this link.

Tell us about your project and your background.“Masters” is the maiden voyage of the Vanderbilt Republic Foundation, a creative agency that partners with Arts/Culture/Human Justice non-profits to spur the realization of their mission. Right now, we’re allied with Cambodian Living Arts (CLA). They work to foster the contemporary expression of traditional Khmer performing arts, repairing the profound cultural damage wrought during the brutal Khmer Rouge years. CLA connects the few performing arts Masters that survived the genocide with the next generation of students, and this work is crucial: in Cambodia, all arts teaching is done orally, as in ancient times. When a Master dies, their knowledge goes with them, and that knowledge can itself extend backwards in time by centuries.

CLA has the vision that by the year 2020, the arts can become Cambodia’s international identity (not the killing fields), and this is what really caught our attention. We want to get them there, and in the process, construct a new iconography. One radiant with hope.

We’ll spend two months in Cambodia, shooting the Masters, their students, their art forms and the incredible world they inhabit, all using a large-format film-based process and commercial thinking/standards. This approach, partnered with the planned life-sized traveling exhibition, will allow us to fully communicate the vibrancy of their individual stories and the universal truth of the renewal each Master/student embodies.

As for me, I’m a Queens-born portrait photographer by profession, and have a 3.5 year-old son, Benjamin Más. The boy is my power source.

How’s it going so far?We’ve so far raised more than any project in Kickstarter history. I don’t expect to hold that crown long (especially not with Obama’s designer hanging around here), and Kickstarter is itself still quite young, but it’s a hell of a thing. When we put “Masters” up, back in the beginning of August, the space was mainly a collection of music projects. A project that sought to effect international change and needed an eye-popping $50,000 to do it was a bit different. Still is, I suppose. But there’s simply no other way we could be in this excellent position, at this point, without Kickstarter. Traditional fundraising takes too long and is almost wholly reliant on pre-existing networks of affluence. Being able to offer a compelling return on investment while appealing to a broad audience is, in 2009, the only way.

What will you do with the money?Every penny goes towards the production expenses for the shoot. $50,000 represents the unavoidable costs; the total cost of the production is higher, but we’ve secured strategic partnerships that will save us significant sums. ROOT, for example, is donating all the equipment needed for the shoot, for the entire month. That’s a gift worth about $63,000. In this fashion, we’re avoiding every expense we can. But to take a full crew to Cambodia, for two months, prepared to go anywhere required in-country for the shoot, with a full-time translator and local production crew involves some level of inevitable cost. A comparable commercial shoot, for the same length of time, with equivalent deliverables, would be a seven digit production. I say this with no exaggeration. Only a truly cohesive, creative, effective team could pull this off, and I can tell you that the past year has been the most profound team-building exercise of our lives. These days, I tend to think that Matthew, Dwayne and I can do anything.

Any closing thoughts?This place that we find ourselves in is a testament to the remarkable goodwill, support, advice, attention, and love we’ve received. We’re a miracle of collective creation, and as much as I want us to reach our goal for all the stated reasons, I often find myself thinking about what this project can mean to the people that believe in us. 2009 has been rough for everyone, and has hollowed out too many people I adore. Each instance weighs on me. To create something lasting for them… It would be a good fate.

Caroline Myss:Developing self-esteem requires an act of revolution, or several mini-revolutions, in which we begin to separate from group thought and establish our own sense of authority. We may suddenly realize we hold an opinion different from our family or our peers, but in either case we will have difficulty freeing ourselves from the group’s energy — whose strength depends upon numbers and opposition to most expressions of individuality.

The act of finding our own voice, even in mini-revolutions, is spiritually significant. Spiritual maturity is measured not by the sophistication of a person’s opinions, but by their genuineness and the courage necessary to express and maintain them. By courage, I do not mean the intractable stubbornness of two people locking horns. Spiritual maturity is the capacity to stand one’s ground as a reflection of a genuine inner belief.